How do you get the best out of yourself if you get easily distracted? According to Grant Skinner, you need to be able to play around and have fun with the technology to keep boredom at bay. Pick something you’re interested in and give yourself time to play with it – and whenever you can, make a conscious effort to be easily inspired. A key trend for Grant is to incorporate music and he also tends to build things that are mesmerising – then he spends more time tweaking things and trying to make it sound perfect or look more interesting… something that took 30 mins to build can then take all day tweaking and playing with it til it feels right.
Experimentation lets you do what you want to do – it’s not going to make you money, but if you share what you create and demonstrate your enthusiasm for it then sometimes people say they love it and will actually pay you for it, if you’re lucky.
So rather than wait until you’re asked to create something, actually create opportunities for yourself, build it as a proof of concept, show it’s possible and then attract people to hopefully pay you to do what you love.
Creating reusable code and tools also means you create libraries can use in day to day work. Grant talked about iteration and recombination – you can combine libraries together and open source your code and tools.
If you do get bored, pick up something else and then come back to your original idea and you’ll see how to take it to the next level and that dispels the boredom. You can sometimes combine ideas to make something even better – plus you learn random things doing this kind of experimentation too.
The trick is to fail – and then make it work! There’s no pressure in this playful environment which allows you to go past failing – no clients, no deadlines. It’s also a good idea to break things up into chunks – Grant showed his time plan where he breaks out tasks into chunks of 30 minutes to 2 hours. He also gives himself micro rewards, like 20 minutes of video games. Grant closed with 2 more pieces of wisdom – challenge yourself by learning something new and start small but dream big. Of course, the most important thing is to have fun – chase the stupid stuff and see what happens, because if you follow your interests the worst thing that can happen is you have a bit of fun. Sounds good to me…
A great first #FOTB session from a hugely talented guy. Find Grant’s blog here or follow him @gskinner.
